A parent cooperative for young children

March 2011

Spring will be coming… eventually! March weather can be VERY unpredictable. We’ll continue to go outside as much as possible, so please be sure to bring all appropriate clothing. Even as the temperature gets warmer, snow pants can be useful in keeping clothing dry and clean. Remember, preschoolers love to get dirty!

We’ll be having a parent meeting on Wednesday, March 2nd at 6:30 pm. We’ll talk about the Mrs. McPuppet show, student assessments and upcoming conferences. We’ll also talk about some workshop ideas for our future parent meetings. If there’s anything else you’d like on bring up, please let me know.

Don’t miss Mrs. McPuppet on Saturday, March 12th in the upstairs chapel. This will be our final fundraiser of the year, and it will be great fun for the whole family! We have a group of parents who will be organizing the show, but we need everyone’s help by providing snacks for the show and donations for raffle baskets.

We’re planning an open house for the evening of Wednesday, March 23rd for any new families interested in enrolling for next fall. If you know of any families who would like to see the school and meet the teachers, please let them know. You will all receive registration forms for next year at the end of the month with time to pre-register before new families. It’s time to start thinking about kindergarten! If your child will be eligible to start kindergarten in the fall you should contact your elementary school office. Most school districts will be doing screening in the next few months.

We’re continuing our student assessments this month and we’ll be having parent-teacher conferences at the end of the month. We’re setting aside three days when there won’t be any classes, but you will have the chance for some uninterrupted time to meet with teachers. There will be no class during the conference days, March 30 through April 1. Watch for the sign-up sheet later in the month. If another time would be more convenient to meet, please let me know.

April Activities: We haven’t finished planning for the entire month, but we do have a number of things in mind. This month we’ll be talking about our five senses, the coming spring, and changing weather. We’ll continue to graph the weather and watch for signs of spring. We’ll also test our senses and do some experiments to see how each one works. Our first book after winter break will be the classic The Snowy Day by Jack Keats. I’m sure many of you will remember this book from your childhoods. We’ll be making a winter picture with Peter’s red snow suit and chalk drawings. Watch for more details to come…

Terrific Twos: The snow and cold has not kept us from having fun! When the temperature is below 20 or the snow is too deep to get around, we get to play in the big front room. We have a couple favorite listening songs, including Hap Palmer. We also have fun in an obstacle course. The kids are getting pretty good at rotating around the balance beam, tunnel and forward rolls. Sometimes it is like herding cats! They also just like to run and kick the balls around.
In our classroom we have added a train table that we also use as a sensory table and to highlight new toys. We have been able to have snow in our classroom! At circle we are continuing to talk about name and color recognition. We also are using this time to talk about things that match and shapes. We have also introduced scissors to our project time. WOW, that was an exciting day! We will be using them more often, so if an envelope of small snips of paper comes home you will know we have been hard at work.
Even snack time has been exciting. A favorite snack has been ABC pretzels and Scrabble cheese crackers. We are amazed how many letters some of the kids know. We are aiming for recognizing the first letter of their name but many of our kids know many more.
On March 29th and 31st we will not have the use of our classroom because of the church rummage sale. We will be using the library as our classroom for those days. On Tuesday we are hoping to have a music and movement instruction program to start our day. And on Thursday we will join the library for story time. We hope to end our days on our playground, let’s hope for sunny warm days! We will fill you in with details closer to the week. Also, thanks to all our great parents for helping to keep our classroom so clean. We appreciate all your hard work!